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Did you know that paid text link ads can sink your Google rank through a penalty imposed by the search engine giant? I didn’t but David Airey found out first hand recently.

His Google refferals dropped from 30% to 6% thanks to a penalty implemented by Google.

The problem?
Airey started to sell advertising on his site without adding the rel=”nofollow” to hyperlink adverts. This is apparently not such a good idea as Google frowns upon this in a big way. Advertising is allowed but the rel=”nofollow” is essential.

Revenue via advertising is allowed by Google but the company is very clear about what is allowed and what is not:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the ‘a href’ tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Airey has some great links on his post that will help to explain the problem and give you solutions. Money is still able to be made, but make sure you aren’t destroying hard work on the SEO of your blog for a few hundred bucks.

I am interested to know if this sort of “law” applies to javascript adverts or any other kind of advertising on a website? Anyone have any answers? Maybe The Unknown Soldier has some answers?

This is something that I have read a million times when trying to optimise my blogging. Always make sure your blog titles are relevant, succint, effective and have keywords that are searchable.

Obviously there is more to it than just the title (like the content) but the title is very important.

Over the past month or two I have been receiving abnormal amounts of hits for very random, but very specific posts and post titles. Paying traffic fines online seems to be a massive search query at the moment. That was the title of the post, that is the search query and that equals hits for me.

The Live Earth concert that just took place, I posted a very specific post about, very targeted and niche. This post is still receiving massive hits.

This just goes to show how important search engines (not just Google) are and can be if you are smart about it.